Tag: business

I write a lot of English content. I write emails, blog posts and books all in English – but here’s my not so secret weakness. I’m not a native English speaker. I’m Afrikaans.

This causes a problem for me. Mainly one of grammar and sentence structure. Basically what I do wrong is I use English words to write Afrikaans sentences.

When revising my book people noticed this and pointed it out to me, so I realized that I need some help. Now me, I’m constantly reading up on how to use commas, I’m learning new words every day and generally, I just try to better my skills a little every week. It’s not enough.

So, on the prompting of the writing community, I opened a free Grammarly account and that is what I want to write about today.

First, let’s cover some basics

What is Grammarly?

Some would call it a spellcheck, but it’s honestly much more than that. It’s a grammar tool.

Grammarly scans your text for errors such as misused words, misplaced comas misused modifiers and more. Then it points it out to you, explains what is wrong and then gives you the decision to fix it.

I love this not just because it helps me fix my text but because it teaches me about language.
It is like a gentle teacher that not only points out mistakes but uses it as a learning moment. That’s how I choose to see it anyway XD

I’m not going to lie, I’m a complete noob when it comes to Grammarly because not only am I using the free version but I’ve also only been using for a couple of weeks.

I do think that it’s made a difference in my content though and honestly the fact that it caught the stupid mistakes that I would have missed otherwise already has me impressed. I do want to give you a fair evaluation of it though. At least for the version that I’m using. (since I know nothing about the premium version aside that it’s supposed to be even cooler)

So let’s do pros and cons.

Pros.

1. It doesn’t only check spelling but Grammar too.
2. It is a learning opportunity if you are bi-lingual like me.
3. You can edit and personalize your dictionary
4. You can use it on your phone too as well as a firefox plugin, so it checks everything you write on social media.

Cons.

1. There seems to be a size limit on files you can load to be checked. So you can’t load a whole book onto the free version and just run through it. You’ll have to make a plan like go chapter by chapter.
2. The free version only checks for specific problems not all. So you’ll need the premium version to get the whole experience.
3. The premium version costs money.
This is not a real problem to most, just to broke people like me who can’t afford anything that you have to pay in dollars for (conversion rates suck)

My favorite feature would be that it spellchecks everything across my social media automatically. Because I have severe anxiety when it comes to social media, and this helps to ease that. To know that I’m not going to make a massive idiot out of myself by misspelling something really helps me.

I know this is a short review but I hope it helps you make your decision of if you want to use Grammarly. If you do decide to get it, I ask that you use the link in the banner below because that way I get commision – even if you only sign up for the free version.

This post is sponsored by Grammarly, but I hope you can see that I am unbiased about my opinion and I promise I would never recommend anything that I don’t honestly think will help people.
With this said, thank you for reading, and enjoy your writing 🙂